


Refuge of the Incompetent

by StrangeBird



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Destroy Ending, Friendship, Mental Instability, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-01
Updated: 2013-04-04
Packaged: 2017-12-07 05:16:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/744686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StrangeBird/pseuds/StrangeBird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shepard, her rags and her riches in a newly liberated galaxy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

She's lost better friends.

Mordin with a bang, Thane with a whimper.  
 _(that is your influence)_

Doesn't matter.

This is how it happens each night: she drops into a snare of twisted white sheets to sleep. The warmth of the body next to her is sticky and stifling-- oppressive. She'll dream that she wipes all the blood from her eyes, but when daylight creeps in everything will still be washed red.

Garrus stays, Liara leaves. Wrex comes and goes and Joker doesn't say a word in the tens of hours they sit shoulder to shoulder, hunched in the gloom of the gutted Normandy where engineers and mechanics labour endlessly around them.

She wants to tell him.

Hasn't told anyone.

When she's not there, she wanders ravaged London. The bodies of humans and aliens --they decay or are repatriated, flung to wherever in the galaxy is home for one last goodbye. Only do the geth remain, strewn in the streets like so much litter.  
 _(do the geth deserve?)  
_ ( _does this unit?)_  
It's the life she chose, so she inches along.

She's hailed a hero-- she's not. Heroes don't lose. She chose between three things she would never choose so she's lost. The war, her humanity, her friends. Fought so damned hard for a galaxy for everyone and tripped over the finish line, dropped the torch and now it's gone forever.

When she thinks he's ready, she does tell Joker. He laughs in her face. Long, hard and unhinged until he realizes she isn't laughing with him.

They'll lock you up if you let that story get around, he tells her. Then he turns back to Edi's lifeless unit and says no more.

He's listening but he isn't hearing. The Council told her she imagined the Reapers and they were real enough to raze planets and murder entire populations. No, no, no, she didn't imagine the Catalyst. She made the choice and he pays the price.

Warm or cold, there's no body for him to sleep next to.

She soldiers on. London is a very lonely city, mottled grey and brown beneath the ever-crimson sky. It is winter. Reconnaissance squads used to salute as she passed but have learned by now to leave her wide berth. She's got eyes only for the dead-- she examines each geth corpse she stumbles upon for an "on" switch, a port, a something. As if you could restart a life with the touch of a button.

Weeks later, Garrus tells her you can.

He finds her in the mud. She is trying a combination of biotics and brute strength to flip the geth prime she's uncovered onto his back, but the harder she pushes the deeper she sinks.

He offers to help and that's Garrus all over, blindly following the Good Shepard to each insurmountable task. She thinks of the SR-1, Saleon and Saren, the difference between right, wrong, and right or wrong for the wrong or right reasons.

Garrus's flanging voice stutters even as he adopts a cocky pose. Alliance engineers have seen promising responses from Edi's unit. Movement in the legs, and arms, and she's opening her eyes but no real communication yet.

Has she eaten? Isn't she tired? She should get back soon because Joker's putting everyone's teeth on edge and Garrus can't reign him in, not anymore.

She does not miss the naked worry darting in his eyes. He reaches out to pull her out of the mire like a hundred times before, but she rocks back on her haunches, wipes the grime across the thigh of her hardsuit and stares hard at the prime's face, turned to the side as if looking away from a blow.

Garrus's hand flutters a moment before falling to his side where it dangles, purposeless. Her tongue is the same; she should open like a dam and spill everything, but she doesn't-- can't or won't.

She abandons the prime in the end, leaves him in the hands of nature and fate. Two months and a life time ago she might have said a prayer.

( _do you feel different?)_

 

 

When she does go back, Joker is waiting for her. They pick their way through the wreckage that was the third floor of the Normandy slowly, painfully so. She strains to trail him, keep pace with his laboured steps instead of striding ahead. His hands twitch with excitement and she tries to quell the answering tug at her lips, quash the little thing with feathers beating in her ribcage that feels too much like hope. They reach the medbay, and Joker's anticipation stabs along her spine like it is her own. He keys for access to the AI core and the doors slide open.

Metallic eyes drink them in and Edi angles her head, the movement stilted and jerky. There are tears welling in the corner of Joker's eyes as he laughs, almost hysterically. He reaches out to clasp her silver hand in two of his own and cracks wise about damsels in shining armour.

Edi says nothing. Does nothing.

It's not anticipation at her spine this time. This is the tingling intuition of a survivor, and her hand moves to the holster of her gun.

This Edi does not does not blink.

She calls to Joker in warning, and he tuns to her, confused.

Edi's mouth opens and emits a series of grinding clicks. Joker stumbles backwards, dropping the hand like it stings. She moves to take point in front of him, fingering the weapon at her back.

And then Edi finds her voicebox.

"Unable to procure a secure connection to the Cerberus network." She drones in a stranger's tones. "Was Eva Core successful in eradicating Shepard at the Mars Archive Facility?"

She does the only thing she can do. She unholsters her shotgun and blows Edi's head off.

( _only now do I feel alive_ )

 


	2. Chapter 2

It's back to her sojourn after that, and Garrus buzzes around her like a gnat for days. He mutters each time she stops at another fallen geth, questions her when she tries to salvage memory from their central processing, rails against her in one-sided debates. The worry in his eyes is looking more like fear day by day. At night be becomes tender, and that is worse. At night he breathes the same reassuring lie said a hundred different ways _._

She knows better. She let her flock die.

When she can't take any more she activates the tactical cloak Hackett had left at her bedside and leaves him on the bank of the river Thames. It will block her heat signature, and his battle scanner won't pick her up. The network tracking her omni-tool is down, so she should be safe from him. For now.

She doesn't return that night, the next or the one after. In the daylight hours she combs abandoned buildings and stretches of road. At night she watches the rusted twilight sky dissolve, is grateful when there are no stars. There is little wind, but the air is brisk and each morning a layer of frost clings to broken windshields and the ground.

There is no one to call her hero here, in this cold, forgotten place. She hunkers down into her emergency sleeping bag and dreams of Edi, skull patched with material from her breather helmet, N7 emblazoned across her forehead.

( _there was a hole)  
_

At daybreak of the fourth day she swallows two bites of ration bar and a gulp of water before packing up and heading out. Wild dogs roam the streets and she sees the occasional civilian, flitting from building to building like shadows. An hour's search turns up a pair of pryos, seven rocket troopers and a hunter. She is transfixed by the hunter's sleek black body, a medkit instead of the usual plasma shotgun in his cold hands. She rolls him, and beneath she finds the remains of an unclaimed human girl's corpse, badly decomposed and crushed beneath his weight.

Killed by the one who tried to be her champion.  


"Shepard," a voice like thunder cuts through the morning haze and she blinks.

His bulk hurtles over the rise of the hill, and barrels on towards her. He is breathing hard, and his breath steams white in the chilled air. His armour is just a shade darker than the sky, and he blends into the carmine air.

"Shepard," he says again, this time by way of greeting. "Picked a lousy place to run off to."

Wrex. Her eyes dart back to the corpse. He regards her shrewdly, but she's been all out of words for a long time now. She turns her back on him and brings up her omni-tool, trying to salvage any piece of memory the hunter may have in tact.

Nothing.

She tries again. A third time.

Still nothing.

She kicks a toppled tree, and when this does not prove satisfying, she uses her biotics to hurl it through the air. It hits the ground at the bottom of the hill and splinters with a sharp crack.

She moves to another geth a few metres away to try to interface.

Nothing.

Wrex catches her shoulder.

"You're not an engineer, Shepard."

She tears away from his grasp. There's still clumps of grass here and there. Reminders of life. She can see the arm of another geth poking up nearby. The left side of his head and shoulder column are blown apart, all his wiring exposed. They are his veins. His veins and synapses. She kneels next to him, touches her omni-tool.

"Shepard. Give it up."

She has nothing for him.

Then his hands are on her, rough, hauling her bodily from the carcass, and even she must struggle against the strength of a one tonne Krogan Warlord. He's got her by her forearms, facing her, and he narrows his eyes when she begins to glow blue.

"Let go," she hisses between her teeth. "There are more left. I've got to--"

The look he shoots her is part-furious, part harrowed. That cuts through the fog enough to raise alarm bells but it's too late-- he's lowered his head and he's going for the kill.

She's been on the wrong side of plenty of krogan headbutts before. The difference is that this time she hasn't seen it coming.

She soars backwards, knocked flat onto her back. The pain is blinding, and her vision, when she opens her eyes, is doubled. The wind is gone from her lungs and she struggles to suck down a breath. Wrex leans over her, two of his faces obscuring the burning sky.

"Sorry, Shepard," he says, like he means it. He jabs something sharp into her neck and the world slides into quiet black.

 

 

 

She comes to in a bunker, still flat on her back.

She listens before cracking open her eyes.

It's just them.

For a moment she is reassured but then the memory of Wrex's mutiny comes flooding back. She hears his distinct rumbling breathing. The faint odour of his breath, like three day-old meat and alcohol. When she slides her eyes open she can make him out, fumbling with the safety on her shotgun.  
"Joker--send you?" she chokes out.

He doesn't even turn to look at her, just leans her gun carefully against the wall.

"Your cripple pilot didn't do a damned thing. I came because the turian couldn't talk any sense into you. Poor bastard's still out there. Looking for you."  
She drags herself up into a sitting position against the wall. Spots swim green and blue and orange before her eyes, and her tongue feels thick in her throat.

"You gonna tell me you're here to help? After drugging me? Go to hell."

That makes him look.

He snarls, low and dangerous. She can't take him now, not with her reflexes still slow with whatever it is coursing through her veins, but her hand twitches just the same.

"I'm trying to drag you out of yours."

Her lip curls.

He is not impressed.

"Get a grip. You're too old for some youngling's temper tantrum."

He stares hard at her a moment longer before heaving a sigh. He drops next to her and thrusts a canteen in her face. It is near bursting with a foul-smelling liquid. She shouldn't trust him. Not after this morning, but she doesn't have much choice right now.

She wets her lips with it and the sip goes down like acid, setting her innards aflame.

Ryncol, then.

It is not enough to loosen her lips, so she surprises herself when they move without her accord.

"I'm a murderer, Wrex".

He shoots her a strange sort of look.

"Well, yeah. Never bothered you before."

"Never wiped out an entire race before." She spits out the words and locks eyes with him, daring him to challenge her.

He is as silent and unmovable as a mountain next to her.

She pulls another swig of ryncol from the canteen.

"They give me a chance for peace and I pick genocide. And why wouldn't I? It's what I do. In Bahak, now here. Violence."

He's got a tangerine mylar blanket that he takes care to unfold. It crinkles like plastic in the dead silence and he places it over her shoulders. Gentle. Like how he would treat Liara. It's not right.

"The Catalyst said we were ready,"she continues and her voice is nothing but a rasp, like a dry leaf scraping over pavement. "But to reach peace now after hundreds of years--were we really ready?"

"Shepard--"

"It could have been trick. Or a lie or--" she blows out a breath. "Or a hallucination."

They'll lock her up.

She laughs. She laughs till tears prick her eyes. Wrex isn't laughing with her but she doesn't care, not a damn bit. Abruptly, she turns to stare him in his blood-red eyeballs.

"You don't believe me. I don't need you to. But tell me, if the only way to save someone's life was to force them into a covenant with their old enemy, and neither got a say, would you do it? If the change is for the better, makes them both stronger, is it right?"

His eyes narrow. He takes the ryncol from her for a pull, drinks deep from the vessel and passes it back.  
"Strength is earned, not given."

She tips the canteen back to swallow another drink for herself.

"Look at the krogan-- the salarians uplifted us. Thought they were doing us a big favour too, putting expensive guns in our hands and finding us clean planets to live on. Maybe they were, and maybe they weren't. We weren't ready. A hundred and fifty years was all it took for us to trash Garvug. Then we abandoned it to go ruin someone else's world."

"So?"

"I don't know what you did up there, or why the geth shut down like that. But I believe you. And if it was me, I'd have done the same. You force change on someone before they're ready, you just shoot yourself in the quad. You don't earn it with your own sweat and blood, you don't know what it's worth."

She shakes her head."But you made your people change. You made them see."

"I couldn't have done squat if they didn't want it for themselves."

She wonders.

The Catalyst offered perfection. She hadn't trusted it. Synthesis might be the pinnacle of evolution. But is that what evolution was supposed to look like? One soul's choice in a galaxy of sextillions? Without the blood, the sweat, the will of the collective to reach that precipice?

"The geth are dead, Shepard. You can't bring them back."

She knows that this is true.

She sags against the wall.

"What then? I just forget? I owe them."

"Sing the songs of their glory. Tell of their bravery to your children and their children. Carry their spirit with you into every battle and fight with them at your back and in your heart. When the time comes, synthetics will join us again."

( _and the chaos will)_

( _you have hope)  
(you have hope. More than you think.)_

She shudders, like a winter wind has blown through her. Everything is stripped away, and all she has left is exhaustion. Wrex's eyes are wary, but he holds out his hand to her anyway. She lets him pull her up, and together they exit the bunker.

The hills of Kent stretch on before them, fading ever into the distance. Somewhere beyond, she knows, lies the sea. And above--

The sky is grey.

Wrex clasps her shoulder, and does not let go.

"Now bury your dead and live."


	3. Epilogue

She's lost many friends.

All are important.   
  
This is how they do it: they repair the damage to Edi's face. They gather at one of the Citadel's remaining docking bays, solemn in the inky blackness. Traynor, Tali, Vega, all. They bundle her up in a sleeper pod, whisper promises, goodbyes and thanks. And when they have said everything, they push her gently off into the stars.

Joker will not speak to her. Won't even look at her.

She knows that there are some fights even she can't win.

She cannot see Garrus's face through his breather helmet. But they stand shoulder to shoulder, and when she leans against him it is an apology. He brushes his hand against hers-- he has accepted it. He will stand fast with her no matter the task, and she will not leave again. Will welcome whatever warmth he can offer in these dark days with a grateful heart. Wrex has left for Tuchanka already, though a new scar on her forehead and his acumen remain imprinted on her.

Tomorrow she will tell Hackett everything. She will remind whatever remains of the Council of how the geth rallied for them. She will enlist the help of the Shadow Broker to write memoirs, histories and accounts of the geth and the Morning War. She will not sing, but she will speak to whoever will listen, and to whoever won't. She will do these things and more tomorrow.

Today though, she will bury her dead.

It's the life she chose. It's not perfect. It's not poignant. But she's sure as hell going to live it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A great debt of thanks to my friends and my partner, who have become accustomed to find me wild-eyed in the dark in front of my computer screen, nattering away, and who merely ask if it would help if they cued up a save with dialogue from EDI. You're the best.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Isaac Asimov's "Foundation".


End file.
